The City: Fall 2010

The City: Fall 2010 edition, a publication of Houston Baptist University

FA L L 2 0 1 0
B O B DY L A N &
AMERICA
[the0augustinian0artist{
A Conversation
Benjamin Domenech for The City: Today we’ve gathered a group of five
friends and colleagues—including a Catholic, an Evangelical, an Anglican,
an Orthodox Christian and an Atheist Jew—to discuss Bob Dylan, perhaps
the most influential musician alive today, and particularly his fascinating
approach to the spiritual realm, and how he writes about faith and God.
orgive me if I start with a memory, which seems less
wrong if only because the subject we have in Bob Dylan is
the king of reminiscing, mostly about what never was and
what never will be again. The first time I heard Dylan—
really heard him—was a decade ago, my freshman year in
college, when the top ten single list included songs from R. Kelly,
Celine Dion, Britney Spears, Ricky Martin, Christina Aguilera, and
Destiny’s Child. Standing out from a sea of cliche-ridden Pulp Fiction
posters and ludicrously over-sexed pinups, there was one guy in the
hall, a short guy dressed in black who had put up just one poster: a
vast picture of Johnny Cash. He had moved in ahead of us all and
was listening to an album that I would only later come to adore: Dylan’s Time Out of Mind. I, still stuck in the shallow rut of teen angst
songs, listening in the pre-iPod age to a mash of eighties guitar rock,
hippie reboots, and hip hop, mocked it like the young fool I was.
“Hey, it’s The Frosh in Black,” I said to the guy. He did his part to
reinforce the image by wearing a lot of black—and eventually the
whole hall called him that.
I don’t think my folks would reject the description that they were
(and are) hippie Christian musicians—treehuggers turned foresters,
flower children turned evangelicals—and all us kids learned piano
and guitar from them. But the Dylan I heard growing up was limited,
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